Donileen R. Loseke is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology, University fo South Florida. A past-president
of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Dr. Loseke is author of The Battered Women and Shelters:
The Social Construction of Wife Abuse, and coeditor (with Richard Gelles) of Current Controverersies on Family
Violence. Dr. Ellis serves also as coeditor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and as an advisory editor
to Social Problems, a journal.
Summary
While many scholars in sociology, communication, media studies, public policy, psychotherapy, and criminology
use social construction perspectives in their own research, these perspectives tend not to be adequately covered
in popular college-level texts. This book can bring constructionist perspectives into college classrooms because
it offers an accessible overview of these perspectives that is interdisciplinary in scope and historically current
in examples. The topics cover a broad range of issues including how successful images of social problem conditions,
victims, and villains are constructed; how these images shape public policy and social services; and how these
images can change the ways we make sense of ourselves and others. In focusing on what constructionist examination
tells readers about their own lives, this book encourages critical reasoning skills; it encourages readers to become
thoughtful and knowledgeable consumers of all talk about social problems and to think about the individual, social,
and political consequences of the process of constructing public worry.
Table of Contents
Preface Part I. Issues in Studying Social Problems
1. The Problem with Social Problems
2. The People and the Tasks in Constructing Social Problems
Part II. Constructing Successful Packages of Claims
3. Constructing Moralities
4. Constructing Conditions and People
5. Constructing Solutions
Part III. From Social Constructions to Social Actions
6. Social Problems and Everyday Life
7. Social Problems and Social Services
8. Social Constructionist Perspectives on Social Problems
Appendix Social Constructionist Theories and Issues
